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It's hard to know when I first fell in love with baseball. If I put it into my earliest recollection it was when I was cleaning out the garage at age 7 with my dad after our latest move. There was a big leather blob of something for an adult hand I had pulled out of a box and I asked him what it was. "Oh!" he stated surprised, "That's my old baseball glove!"
My hand was too small at the time to fit his mit so I just found a tennis ball and threw pop flies to myself in the yard that summer and the next.
When I was nine, and we moved again, I finally got a glove of my own. It was blue and came from the Target on Lake Street, back when there were still rails on the road from the streetcar. I still remember it had mesh on the outside and leather inside. I actually still own it. It's not in my garage but in my basement. I could even go get it right now if that was necessary.
That summer my new friends across the street also played baseball. We made up games and played hot box in the street. Our bat was a heavy stick that fell from a storm and our bases were the trees of our backyard. When I fell asleep that summer, it was to the soothing voice of Herb Carneal and my next door neighbor's transistor radio tuned to WCCO.
It was Kirby Puckett's rookie year and I all of those factors together: new friends, a new glove and an old man's radio set me on a path for the longest love affair of my life: baseball.
Forty years later I finally made good on my promise to one day get season tickets. When I toured the stadium yesterday I could hardly disguise my giddy excitement and as I write this, I won't deny my eyes are welling a bit with saline.
A few years later, after the Twins won the first of my two childhood World Series' (I saw the trophy yesterday. I could have stayed there all afternoon just counting the flags) I found out that our friend from church wrote for the Star Tribune. His name was Nick Coleman. His brother became the mayor of St. Paul. Nick always made me laugh and I thought he had just about the most glamorous job a person could have- getting to write every day about whatever he pleased. It was then that I thought, "one day, I'm going to go to the ballpark every day and write about it..."
Of course that was long before the internet or cell phones and certainly before blogs. Life has a way of moving and changing on us, doesn't it? Yet much like the chocolate voice of James Earl Jones' baseball speech in 'Field of Dreams', however, I realize that baseball does bring us back to ourselves, it helps us find our way together.
So, for the summer of 2024, I'm going to finally do what I vowed to do over 30 years ago. I'm going to go to the ballpark almost every day, invite a guest and write about it. I hope, like Jerry Seinfeld in 'Getting Coffee with Comedians in Cars', I have interesting and fun people willing to come along for the ride with me. When I let my son take the tickets to share with a friend, the purchase price will to be the guest blogger.
I hope you come along. My voice isn't on the radio, but who knows about a podcast (ha!) but the dulcet tones of my words might lull you to sleep on a long midsummer's day. It might even be a midsummer night's dream, and when you wake up, you'll be in a cornfield paradise cut for the greatest that ever were. Because, perhaps, once again, it's money we have, but it's peace we lack. Maybe, in 2024, we need to be reminded of all that was once good and will be again.
Thanks for reading.
~Becka
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